Word: bolshoi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...capital of the world. This spring Manhattan will provide the backdrop for 16 world premieres at New York City Ballet's Ravel Festival. Galas will be presented by Martha Graham, New York City Ballet and, in the summer, American Ballet Theater. Two foreign companies - the U.S.S.R.'s Bolshoi and Germany's Stuttgart Ballet - will perform at the Metropolitan Opera House. One wonders, in fact, if Diaghilev's Paris or Petipa's St. Petersburg ever had it so good...
Moscow's massive Bolshoi Ballet approaches the great classics of dance-Swan Lake, for example, or Giselle-as if they were museum pieces on the move, as many of them are. The Russians' excessive awe of tradition can be a hindrance when it comes to creating new choreography. A striking case in point is Yuri Grigorovich's Ivan the Terrible, which was given its American premiere at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House last week by a large touring company of the Bolshoi. Grigorovich is probably the Soviet Union's finest classical choreographer...
Beyond Caricature. In fact, the real heroes are the Bolshoi dancers, who survive Grigorovich's overly athletic, cliché-ridden choreography with amazing élan. The crowd scenes, whether they involve battles, conspiring boyars or rebellious peasants, are confused and repetitive, and pale in excitement by comparison with the kind of dashing maneuvers performed by Russia's folkish Moiseyev company. Every grimace and gesture seems aimed broadly at viewers in the last row of the top balcony. Naturally, the boyars are evil beyond the point of caricature; the peasants are simple and good...
Inexplicably, the authors of that arrogant nonbook The Best missed a chance to make a snap judgment that few would challenge-namely, that Maya Plisetskaya is the finest female classical dancer in the world. Last week the reigning ballerina of Russia's Bolshoi Ballet headed a group of touring stars from the company in a week-long engagement at Manhattan's Lincoln Center. Shrewdly, the management announced in advance that she would dance at every performance; otherwise, seeing this uneven cadre of Bolshoiviks -actually, they constitute less than one-third of the entire troupe-without her would...
...dazzling the Metropolitan Opera House audience as Odette in the second act of Swan Lake, and ended it by starring in Carmen Suite, a ballet created especially for her (a rare tribute in the Soviet Union). In between, a dozen or so other soloists performed snippets from the stodgy Bolshoi repertory that allowed them to show off little more than their remarkable discipline...